Well! A one-week Sunday Papers break turned into three, prompted by the seemingly endless school holiday at Easter. Now I return and– Monday is another holiday? Blimey. Nevertheless, let’s do some links.
Polygon, one of the last video game outlets with a reputation for long form reporting and feature writing, was sold to Valnet, a content farm best known for paying writers terribly and being founded by porn peddlers. Most of the staff were immediately fired. Local arsonist believes smouldering rubble has “a lot of potential and could be much more.”
On the same day, Giant Bomb exploded, shedding staff and pausing content production pending a “strategic reset”. Word is that owners Fandom want them to stop producing personality-led livestreams and video content – y’know, the reason anyone likes Giant Bomb – and instead pivot to guides.
All of which felt worth noting here, in the corner of RPS where we typically write about writing. It’s also context for the following series of links, beginning with Nathan Brown’s sensibly outraged response.
This is about more, I think, than the apparent, if not necessarily imminent, death of two well-loved websites. Nor is it merely another tale about the ceaseless ignorance of today’s media conglomerates. More than anything else it is about the death of difference, of innovation, of trying to find new routes to success instead of fighting with everyone else for the same handful of scraps. If Fandom follows through on its designs to turn Giant Bomb into a guides site then arguably the most singular website the games media has ever known will become like all the rest, joining all the other flotsam and jetsam on their endless, pointless churn in the tide of search.
Someone also put together a list of independent games media worth supporting, as well as places you can support now-former Polygon staff.
If you want to understand what made Polygon a great website, you could do worse than read Nicole Carpenter’s 2023 piece on “the untold history of Barbie Fashion Designer, the first mass-market ‘game for girls'”:
Mattel sold more than 1 million copies of Barbie Fashion Designer by 1998, a couple years after its initial release, according to Billboard numbers from 1998. The game topped charts and outsold several games considered to be for boys, like Quake.
Or, for that matter, their primer on video game unions, also by Carpenter.
It is harder than ever to make a video games website successful – although, it must be said, corporate owners are as craven and shortsighted as they’ve always been.
Here’s a thought experiment: what if we made advertising illegal? (sign-up required).
I think there’s a world where we’ll look back on our advertising-saturated era with the same bewilderment with which we now regard cigarette smoke, child labor, or public executions: a barbaric practice that we allowed to continue far too long because we couldn’t imagine an alternative.
Mikhail Klimentov asks that you (and the games media) kill the CEO in your head. This is something that we try to do on RPS, in ways big and small, by focusing on the art and culture of video games and not the business.
My least favorite manifestation of this trend by far is when a writer or content creator says: Well, I liked such and such product, but will everyone else? It’s an unanswerable question masquerading as insight. This has been particularly prevalent around the reveal of the Nintendo Switch 2 and Bungie’s Marathon. I’m hype for the Switch 2, but will fans be willing to pay for it? Will people care enough about the new features? I tested Marathon and enjoyed it, but will enough people like it? Will it do well enough to satisfy Sony?
Hearing Things, which I’ve linked before, has become one of my favourite independent websites setup in the aftermath of boneheaded executive decisions, in this case at Pitchfork. This piece about what the author, Jill Mapes, learned about listening to music from her dad, is wonderful.
Picture it: A grown man lying on the carpeted floor of a living room, legs up on the couch, listening to music on headphones in the dark for an hour, multiple times a week. He situated himself this way, in part, because he has chronic back and shoulder pain related to an accident in his early 20s where he was clipped by a semi-truck while mowing grass for the county. But his private listening sessions were also, very clearly to me at least, about processing his feelings. Sometimes, I would spot the faint glimmer of a tear rolling down his cheek and into the yellow foam of his vintage headphones. I saw firsthand that music was a place to seek out emotional mirrors—to feel into and through song lyrics, but also the ineffable emotions that music can channel.
That’s a slightly older piece (I’ve been away, remember), but if you want something video-gamey, Mapes interviewed Soccer Mommy this past week about her love of Stardew Valley.
A lot of player-driven trading economies in video games (and prisons, I’m told) end up using a particular item essentially as currency. Laura Michet recently wrote about how that has happened in Pokémon Home, mostly due to limitations with the app’s seemingly terrible UI.
Today, you’d list your first shiny Pokemon for, probably, Raging Bolt – the weird giraffe Pokemon at the top of this post. Once someone gives you a Raging Bolt, you’ll search for the shinies you want and see if any have been listed by a person who is seeking Raging Bolt. Someone probably will be. You’ll make that trade, and now the player you traded with has a fungible Raging Bolt to use for whatever purpose they desire.
Michet worked on Skin Deep, which came out this week, and has also been blogging about it recently.
You are into mousetrap YouTube.
Haim are releasing new music at the moment, but music this week is still 2020’s Summer Girl. Sunday Papers music picks are all available in a YouTube playlist. This week’s magic number is 13.